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The Joy of Writing Women’s Lit from a Man’s POV

Posted by
Jo Linsdell
at
5:39 PM

Gabriela and The Widow is the third novel I’ve
written with women protagonists. Early on, I worked out a post-apocalyptic
novel called Citadel and later I came
up with Lemon Custard. I got some
static about Lemon Custard for not
pulling a Nora Helmer (from A Doll’s
House) and turning Olive, my protagonist, into some kind of liberation
heroine. But Olive is a regular woman with kids trying to find a way to make it
when the odds roll against her. Gabriela is a different kind of woman. She’s
been hurt, displaced, damaged. Writing from her POV was a challenge.

I think
that men are uneasy writing in a woman’s voice but I find it provoking and rewarding.
The challenges are enormous because we’re always bugged by the limiting specter
of American Realism in the literary novel: Write
what you know. If you haven’t lived it, you can’t write about it.

This
tells us that because I’m not a woman I can’t write either for women or about women.
Realism is a trap I won’t fall into even when I get the question that drives me
nuts: Did this really happen?

Look at
me—I’m six feet tall, weigh 190, wear cowboy boots and ride a Harley. Do I look
like a 19 year old Mexican woman? No, it didn’t happen to me and it’s not based
on a “True Story”. This is fiction. I love to create good women who stand toe
to toe with good men. Reality belongs in a memoir. In fiction, it’s about
emotion.

Fear,
Love, Anger, Grief, Joy, Surprise. If you want to write human characters and
bring down everything we are onto the written page, and if you want to reach
into the minds and senses of readers, you give the reader what the characters
feel and project. Men feel fear. Women show surprise. Women get angry, men do
too. We all have the same emotions. In writing, it’s reaction that gives you
character and character has nothing to do with gender.

I want to share
with you a few words about how I write. Every Tuesday and Friday, I sit down
with a bunch of writers at Louisa’s Bakery Café in Seattle. We write for forty-five minutes
under the clock. For years I wrote alone until Robert Ray introduced me to Natalie
Goldberg and timed writing. Working with other writers—especially writers who
know more than you do—gets you outside your head. You get feedback faster, you
get to the rewrite quicker. The way I see it, the art is in the rewrite so the
sooner you get a working draft the better you’ll write. With timed writing you
don’t die in Act Two.

Timed
writing—what Natalie Goldberg calls “Writing Practice”—is either the devil’s
design to stifle your creativity or the gateway to a paradise of writing. For
me, timed writing is liberation. Timed writing is easy: you get a kitchen
timer, set it for five, ten, fifteen minutes and write as deep and rich as your
hand will let you. I like the physical connection of the fountain pen on paper,
so I write longhand. Some writers at Louisa’s write on laptops. That’s okay.
The idea is to finish what you start—that’s the major discipline. Finish what
you start.

I use “start
lines” to get going. If I’m working on a novel, I might use—“Today I rewrite
the scene called…

If I’m with my
group at Louisa’s and I’m not locked into a novel or a story, the start line
“today I’m writing about…” gives me plenty of room to explode. I use timed
writing to write treatments, scene summaries, memoir moments, short stories, screenplay
scenes. The big thing with timed writing is that you can use it to go nuts on
the page, or you can use it in a very structured way to create tight, hard,
clear, clean sentences, scenes, stories. I don’t think in terms of paragraphs,
but I do think in terms of “action” and “image.” When I’m writing in a more
structured way, I use a directed set of start lines. For instance, to write a
three-act treatment for a novel here’s a set of start lines you can use:

Act One opens when….

Act One ends when….

Act Two opens in a scene
called….

At the middle of my story, my
protagonist….

Act Two ends when….

Act Three opens when….

My story climaxes in a scene
called….

My story ends with this final
image….

I keep
a blog with Robert J Ray, author of the Matt Murdock detective novels. We’ve
posted everything we know about writing there—http://bobandjackswritingblog.com.
Take a look. It’s there for the asking.

Guest post by Jack Remick, a poet, short story writer and novelist. In 2012, Coffeetown Press published the first two volumes of Jack’s California Quartet series, The Deification and Valley Boy. The final two volumes will be released in 2013: The Book of Changes and Trio of Lost Souls. Blood, A Novel was published by Camel Press, an imprint of Coffeetown Press, in 2011. You can find Jack online at http://jackremick.com

Jo, thanks for hosting Jack Remick and letting him share such an interesting guest post on writing. I'm always inspired by his posts and this is just another great one to add to the long list of wonderful posts on this site.